Pelle the Conqueror, Vol. 4 by Martin Anderson Nexo

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Morten looked tired out, for he was still not strong. "I've let myself
in for something that I'm not equal to," he said despondently.

"Who is the poor child?" asked Pelle softly.

"I don't know. She came to me this spring, almost dead drunk and in a
fearful state; and the next day she regretted it and went off, but I got
hold of her again. She's one of those poor creatures who have no other
home than the big timber-yards, and there she's made a living by going
from one to another of the bigger lads. I can get nothing out of her,
but I've found out in other ways that she's lived among timber-stacks
and in cellars for at least two years. The boys enticed dissolute men
out there and sold her, taking most of the money themselves and giving
her spirits to encourage her. From what I can make out there are whole
organized bands which supply the dissolute men of the city with boys and
girls. It makes one sick to think of it! The child must be an orphan,
but won't, as I said, tell me anything. Once or twice I've heard her
talk in her sleep of her grandmother; but when I've referred to it, she
sulks and won't speak."

"Does she drink?" asked Pelle.

Morten nodded. "I've had some bad times with her on that account," he
said. "She shows incredible ingenuity when it's a case of getting hold
of liquor. At first she couldn't eat hot food at all, she was in such a
state. She's altogether fearfully shattered in soul and body, and causes
me much trouble."

"Why don't you get her into some home?"

"Our public institutions for the care of children are not calculated to
foster life in a down-trodden plant, and you'll not succeed with Johanna
by punishment and treatment like any ordinary child. At times she's
quite abnormally defiant and unmanageable, and makes me altogether
despair; and then when I'm not looking, she lies and cries over herself.
There's much good in her in spite of everything, but she can't let it
come out. I've tried getting her into a private family, where I knew
they would be kind to her; but not many days had passed before they came
and said she'd run away. For a couple of weeks she wandered about, and
then came back again to me. Late one evening when I came home, I found
her sitting wet and shivering in the dark corner outside my door. I was
quite touched, but she was angry because I saw her, and bit and kicked
as she did just now. I had to carry her in by force. Her unhappy
circumstances have thrown her quite off her balance, and I at any rate
can't make her out. So that's how matters stand. I sleep on the sofa in
here, but of course a bachelor's quarters are not exactly arranged for
this. There's a lot of gossip too among the other lodgers."

"Does that trouble you?" asked Pelle in surprise.

"No, but the child, you see--she's terribly alive to that sort of thing.
And then she doesn't comprehend the circumstances herself. She's only
about eleven or twelve, and yet she's already accustomed to pay for
every kindness with her weak body. Can't you imagine how dreadful it is
to look into her wondering eyes? The doctor says she's been injured
internally and is probably tuberculous too; he thinks she'll never get
right. And her soul! What an abyss for a child! For even one child to
have such a fate is too much, and how many there are in the hell in
which we live!"

They were both silent for a little while, and then Morten rose. "You
mustn't mind if I ask you to go," he said, "but I must get to work;
there's something I've got to finish this evening. You won't mind, will
you? Come and see me again as soon as you can, and thanks for coming
this time!" he said as he pressed Pelle's hand.

"I'd like you to keep your eyes open," he said as he followed him to the
door. "Perhaps you could help me to find out the history of the poor
thing. You know a lot of poor people, and must have come in some way or
other into her life, for I can see it in her. Didn't you notice how
eager she was to have a look at you? Try to find out about it, will
you?"

Pelle promised, but it was more easily said than done. When his thoughts
searched the wide world of poverty to which he had drawn so close during
the great lock-out, he realized that there were hundreds of children who
might have suffered Johanna's fate.

V

Pelle had got out his old tools and started as shoemaker to the dwellers
in his street. He no longer went about seeking for employment, and to
Ellen it appeared as if he had given up all hope of getting any. But he
was only waiting and arming himself: he was as sanguine as ever. The
promise of the inconceivable was still unfulfilled in his mind.

There was no room for him up in the small flat with Ellen doing her
washing there, so he took a room in the high basement, and hung up a
large placard in the window, on which he wrote with shoemaker's ink,
"Come to me with your shoes, and we will help one another to stand on
our feet." When Lasse Frederik was not at work or at school, he was
generally to be found downstairs with his father. He was a clever fellow
and could give a hand in many ways. While they worked they talked about
all sorts of things, and the boy related his experiences to his father.

He was changing very rapidly and talked sensibly about everything. Pelle
was afraid he was getting too little out of his childhood. "Aren't you
going up to play with them?" he asked, when the boys of the neighborhood
rushed shouting past the basement window; but Lasse Frederik shook his
head. He had played at being everything, from a criminal to a king, so
there was nothing more to be had in that direction. He wanted something
real now, and in the meantime had dreams of going to sea.

Although they all three worked, they could only just make ends meet;
there was never anything over for extras. This was a sorrow to Ellen
especially; Pelle did not seem to think much about it. If they only put
something eatable before him, he was contented and did not mind what it
was.

It was Ellen's dream that they should still, by toiling early and late,
be able to work themselves up into another stratum; but Pelle was angry
when she worked on after the time for leaving off. He would rather they
were a little poor, if only they could afford to be human beings. Ellen
did not understand it, but she saw that his mind was turned in another
direction; he who had hitherto always fallen asleep over books would now
become so absorbed in them that he did not hear the children playing
round him. She had actually to rouse him when there was anything she
wanted; and she began to fear this new power which had come in place of
the old. It seemed like a curse that something should always work upon
him to take him beyond her. And she dared not oppose it; she had bitter
experience from former times.

"What are you looking for in those books?" she asked, sitting down
beside him. Pelle looked up absently. His thoughts were in far-off
regions where she had never been. What was he looking for? He tried to
tell her, but could not explain it. "I'm looking for myself!" he said
suddenly, striking boldly through everything. Ellen gazed at him,
wondering and disappointed.

But she tried again. This time nothing should come between them and
destroy her world. She no longer directly opposed anything; she meant to
_go with him_ and be where he was. "Tell me what you are doing and
let me take part in it," she said.

Pelle had been prepared to some extent to go into this by himself, and
was glad to meet with a desire for development in her too. For the
present the intellectual world resembled more or less a wilderness, and
it was good to have a companion with him in traversing it.

He explained to her the thoughts that occupied him, and discussed them
with her; and Ellen observed wonderingly that it was all about things
that did not concern their own little well-being. She took great pains
to comprehend this flight away from the things that mattered most; it
was like children who always wanted what they ought not to have.

In the evening, when Boy Comfort and Sister had been put to bed, Pelle
would take a book and read aloud. Ellen was occupied with some mending
or other, and Lasse Frederik, his ears standing out from his head, hung
over a chair-back with his eyes fixed upon his father. Although he did
not understand the half of it, he followed it attentively until Nature
asserted herself, and he fell asleep.

Ellen understood this very well, for she had great difficulty herself in
keeping her eyes open. They were not stories that Pelle read. Sometimes
he would stop to write something down or to discuss some question or
other. He would have the most extraordinary ideas, and see a connection
between things that seemed to Ellen to be as far apart as the poles; she
could not help thinking that he might very well have studied to be a
pastor. It suited him, however; his eyes became quite black when he was
explaining some subject that he was thoroughly interested in, and his
lips assumed an expression that made her long to kiss them. She had to
confess to herself that in any case it was a very harmless evening
occupation, and was glad that what was interesting him this time kept
him at home at any rate.

One day Pelle became aware that she was not following him. She did not
even believe in what he was doing; she had never believed in him
blindly. "She's never really loved me either: that's why!" he thought
despondently. Perhaps that explained why she took Boy Comfort as calmly
as if he were her own child: she was not jealous! Pelle would willingly
have submitted to a shower of reproaches if afterward she had given him
a kiss wetted with hot tears; but Ellen was never thrown off her
balance.

Happy though they were, he noticed that she, to a certain extent,
reckoned without him, as if he had a weakness of which it was always
well to take account. Her earlier experiences had left their mark upon
her.

* * * * *

Ellen had been making plans with regard to the old room and the two
small ante-rooms at the end of it. She was tired of washing; it paid
wretchedly and gave a great deal of work, and she received very little
consideration. She now wanted to let lodgings to artistes. She knew of
more than one woman in their street who made a nice living by taking in
artistes. "If I'd only got a couple of hundred krones (10 or 11 pounds)
to start it with, I'm sure I should make it pay," she said. "And then
you'd have more time and quiet for reading your books," she added
coaxingly.

Pelle was against the plan. The better class of artistes took rooms at
the artiste hotels, and the people _they_ might expect to get had
not much to pay with. He had seen a good deal of them from his basement
window, and had mended shoes for some of them: they were rather a
soleless tribe. She said no more about it, but he could see that she was
not convinced. She only dropped the subject because he was against it
and it was he who would have to procure the money.

He could not bear to think this; he had become cautious about deciding
for others. The money might be obtained, if in no other way, by giving
security in his furniture and tools. If the plan did not succeed, it
would be certain ruin; but perhaps Ellen thought him a wet blanket.

One day he threw down his leather apron and went out to raise the money.
It was late when he came home, and Ellen was standing at the door
waiting for him with a face of anxiety.

"Here's the money, my dear! What'll you give me for it?" he said gaily,
and counted out into her hand a hundred and eighty krones (L10) in
notes. Ellen gazed in surprise at the money; she had never held so large
a sum in her hands before.

"Wherever did you get all that money from?" she asked at last.

"Well, I've trudged all day from place to place," said Pelle cheerfully,
"and at last I was directed to a man in Blaagaard Street. He gave me two
hundred krones (L11) on the furniture."

"But there's only one hundred and eighty (L10) here!"

"Oh, well, he took off twenty krones (L1 2_s_.). The loan's to be
repaid in instalments of twenty krones (L1 2_s_.) a month for
fifteen months. I had to sign a statement that I had borrowed three
hundred krones (L16 10_s_.), but then we shan't have to pay any
interest."

Ellen stared at him in amazement. "Three hundred krones, and we've only
got a hundred and eighty, Pelle!" But she suddenly threw her arms round
his neck and kissed him passionately. "Thank you!" she whispered. He
felt quite dazed; it was not like her to be so vehement.

She had plenty to do, after hiring the room, in putting it in order. The
loose beams had to be fixed up, and the walls plastered and whitewashed
a little. The old peasant was willing enough to let it, but he would not
hear of going to any expense. Ellen at last succeeded, however, in
getting him to agree to pay half the repairs on condition that she took
the room for a year and payed the rent in advance. "We can get my
brother Frederik to do some of the repairs on Sunday morning," she said
to Pelle, "and then perhaps we shall get it done for nothing." She was
altogether very energetic.

There was need for it too. The rent swallowed up the hundred krones (L5
10_s_.), and then there were all the things that had to be got. She
bought a quantity of cheap print, and hung it up so as to divide one
side of the room into a number of small compartments each provided with
a second-hand bed and hay mattress, and a washing-stand. "Artistes are
not so particular," she said, "and I'm sure they'll be glad to have the
room to practise in." Finally there were the two little anterooms, which
were to be furnished a little better for more particular artistes. There
was not nearly enough money, and some of the things had to be taken on
credit.

At last it was all ready to receive the guests. It looked quite smart
for the amount spent on it, and Pelle could not but admire her
cleverness in making a little go a long way. The only thing now left to
do was to catch the birds, but here Ellen's practical sense ceased to
act; she had no idea how to proceed. "We must advertise," she said, and
counted up her remaining pence.

Pelle laughed at her. A lot of good it would be to advertise for people
who were goodness knows where on railways and steamers! "What shall we
do then?" she said, looking anxiously to him for help. After all, he was
the man for it all.

Well, first of all there must be a German placard down on the street-
door, and then they must make the rooms known. Pelle had studied both
German and English in the prison, and he made up the placard himself. He
had cards printed, and left them in the artistes' tavern at the corner
of Vesterbro Street, went there himself two or three times after
midnight when the artistes gathered there when their work was finished,
and stationed himself at the stage-entrances of the music-halls. He soon
came to look upon it as a task to be performed, like everything with
which he occupied himself; and this _should_ succeed!

Ellen looked on wondering and helpless. She had all at once grown
frightened, and followed each of his movements with anxious attention.

Soon, however, things began to move. The girls whose washing Ellen had
done took an interest in the undertaking, and sent lodgers to her; and
Lasse Frederik, who had the run of the circus stables, often returned
with some Russian groom or other who did a turn as a rustic dancer or a
Cossack horseman. Sometimes there lived with her people from the other
side of the world where they walk with their heads down--fakirs and
magicians from India and Japan, snake-charmers from Tetuan, people with
shaven heads or a long black pigtail, with oblique, sorrowful eyes,
loose hips and skin that resembled the greenish leather that Pelle used
for ladies' boots. Sister was afraid of them, but it was the time of his
life to Lasse Frederik. There were fat Tyrolese girls, who came three by
three; they jodeled at the music-halls, and looked dreadful all day,
much to Ellen's despair. Now and then a whole company would come, and
then trapezes and rings creaked in the great room, Spanish dancers went
through their steps, and jugglers practised new feats.

They were all people who should preferably not be seen off the stage.
Ellen often went to the circus and music-halls now, but could never
quite believe that the performers were the same men and women who went
about at home looking like scarecrows. Most of them required nothing
except that the lodging should be cheap; they boarded themselves, and
goodness knows what they lived on. Some of them simply lighted a fire on
a sheet of iron on the floor and made a mixture of rice or something of
the sort. They could not eat Danish food, Pelle said. Sometimes they
went away without paying, and occasionally took something with them; and
they often broke things. There was no fortune to be made out of them,
but in the meantime Ellen was satisfied as long as she could keep it
going, so that it paid the rent and instalments on the loan and left her
a little for her trouble. It was her intention to weed out the more
worthless subjects, and raise the whole tone of the business when it had
got into good order.

"You really might refuse the worst work now, and save yourself a
little," she said to Pelle when he was sitting over some worn-out
factory shoes that had neither sole nor upper. Most boots and shoes had
done service somewhere else before they reached this neighborhood; and
when they came to Pelle there was not much left of them. "Say no to it!"
said Ellen. "It's far too hardly earned for you! And we shall get on now
without having to take everything." In the kindness of her heart she
wanted him to be able to read his books, since he had a weakness for
them. Her intention was good, but Pelle had no thought of becoming an
aesthetic idler, who let his wife keep him while he posed as a learned
man. There were enough of them in the neighborhood, and the inhabitants
looked up to them; but they were not interesting. They were more or less
another form of drunkard.

To Pelle books were a new power, grown slowly out of his sojourn in
prison. He had sat there alone with his work, thrown on himself for
occupation, and he had examined himself in every detail. It was like
having companionship when he brought to light anything new and strange
in himself; and one day he chanced upon the mistiness of his own being,
and discovered that it consisted of experience that others had gone
through before him. The Bible, which always lay on the prisoner's table
for company, helped him; its words had the sound of a well-known voice
that reminded him strongly of Father Lasse's in his childhood. From the
Bible he went on further and discovered that the serious books were men
who sat in solitude like himself, and spoke out.

Was solitude so dreadful then when you had such company? Pelle was no
longer able to comprehend his own fear of it. As a child he had been a
creature in the widest sense, and found companionship in everything; he
could converse with trees, animals, and stones. Those fibers had
withered, and no longer conveyed nourishment; but then he became one
with the masses, and thought and felt exactly as they did. That was
crumbling away too now; he was being isolated distinctly, bit by bit,
and he was interested in discovering a plan in it. He had made
Nature subject to him even as a child, and had afterward won the masses!
It was solitude now that had to be taken, and he himself was going about
in the midst of it, large and wonderful! It was already leaving
indelible traces in his mind, although he had seen nothing of it yet. He
felt strangely excited, very much as he had felt when, in his childhood,
he arrived in Bornholm with his father and could see nothing, but heard
the movement of thronging life behind the mist. A new and unknown world,
full of wonders and throbbing with anticipation, would meet him in
there.

Pelle's action was not due to his own volition. He might as well try to
lift himself up by his hair as determine that now he would be a human
being by himself. It was an awakening of new powers. He no longer let
sunshine and rain pass unnoticed over his head. A strange thing happened
to him--he looked wonderingly at everything that he had formerly passed
by as commonplace, and saw it all in a new, brilliant light. He had to
go all over it from the beginning, look at every detail. How wonderfully
everything was connected, sorrow and joy and apparent trifles, to make
him, Pelle, who had ruled over hundreds of thousands and yet had to go
to prison in order to feel himself rich! Something had been ignited in
him that could never be extinguished, a sacred fire to which everything
must bear fuel, whether it would or not. He could not be conquered now;
he drew strength from infinity itself.

The bare cell--three paces one way and six the other--with its tiny
window and the mysterious peephole in the door which was like a watchful
eye upon one always, how much it had held! It had always been the lot of
the poor man to create worlds out of the void, beautiful mirages which
suddenly broke and threw him back even poorer and more desolate. But
this lasted. All the threads of life seemed to be joined together in the
bare cell. It was like the dark, underground place in large buildings
where the machinery is kept that admits and excludes light and heat to
the whole block. There he discovered how rich and varied life is.

Pelle went about in a peculiarly elevated frame of mind. He felt that
something greater and finer than himself had taken up its abode within
him and would grow on to perfection there.

It was a new being that yet was himself; it remained there and drew
nourishment from everything that he did. He went about circumspectly and
quietly, with an introspective expression as though he were weighing
everything: there was so much that was not permissible because it might
injure _it_! There were always two of them now--Pelle and this
wonderful, invisible ego, which lay securely and weightily within him
like a living thing, with its roots in the darkness.

Pelle's relations to books were deeply grounded: he had to find out what
the world meant now. He was a little distrustful of works of fiction;
you got at their subject-matter too easily, and that could not be right.
They were made up, too! He needed real stuff, facts. There were great
spaces in his brain that longed to be filled with a tangible knowledge
of things. His favorite reading was historical works, especially social
history; and at present he read everything that came in his way, raw and
unsweetened; it would have to sort itself out. It was a longing that had
never been satisfied, and now seemed insatiable.

He minded his work punctiliously, however. He had made it a principle
never to touch a book as long as any work lay waiting unfinished on the
floor. In prison he had dreamt of a reasonable working-day of--for
instance--eight hours, so that he would have time and strength to occupy
himself with intellectual matters; but now he took it off his night's
sleep instead. This was at any rate a field out of which they need not
try to keep him; he would have his share in the knowledge of the times.
He felt it was a weapon. The poor man had long enough retired willingly
into the corner for want of enlightenment, and whenever he put out his
head he was laughed back again. Why did he not simply wrest the
prerogative from the upper classes? It cost only toil, and in that coin
he was accustomed to pay! He was scarcely deficient in ability; as far
as Pelle could see at present, almost all the pioneers of the new state
of things came from the lower classes.

He discovered with pleasure that his inward searching did not carry him
away from the world, for far in there he came out again into the light--
the light itself! He followed the secret laws for his own inward being,
and found himself once more deep in the question of the welfare of the
multitude. His practical sense required this confirmation of the
conditions. There were also outward results. Even now history could no
longer be used to light him and his ideas home; he knew too much. And
his vision grew from day to day, and embraced an ever-widening horizon.
Some day he would simply take the magic word from the trolls and wake
the giant with it!

He worked hard and was as a rule full of confidence. When the last of
the artistes came home from their _cafe_, he was often sitting
working by the light of his shoemaker's lamp. They would stop before the
open basement window and have a chat with him in their broken Danish.
His domestic circumstances were somewhat straitened; the instalments in
repayment of the loan, and the debt on the furniture still swallowed all
that they were able to scrape together, and Pelle had no prospect of
getting better work. But work is the bearer of faith, and he felt sure
that a way would open out if only he kept on with it unweariedly.

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